She Said Yes

14 Oct She Said Yes

Two things have been the focus of my life for the past couple of years. My girlfriend and Sky Pets. So it seems fitting that I would take the opportunity to make things extra special by releasing the game and asking her to marry me at the same time. Sky Pets is a pretty simple game that’s challenging to master. You create your own pet and have it dive through the sky as you dodge dangerous obstacles. We were inspired by our three cats and our love for classic Nintendo games. Development took a long time since it was just the two of us and we were still learning how to make games when we first started. We also wanted it to be very professional looking. The game started development in late 2012 with on and off development since we were working during the day and doing freelance work. After a too long development cycle we finally released today. We essentially restarted making the game at the beginning of this year and it looks/plays so much better.

Along with finishing the game I had been wanting to ask my girlfriend to marry me since we first started making it. I had the plan on how I would actually execute the proposal You may be wondering why I would wait so long but it was due to the fact that I wanted to complete this game, otherwise I wouldn’t feel worthy. It was frustrating having to wait but in the end it was worth it. The plan was originally going to be to create a level that looked like every other one and then mid way through have our lead character Rusty change into a tuxedo. He would then take control of the game and say how wonderful she is and how I want to be with her forever then he would kick it over to me to ask the question. All of this would happen at a release party that we are throwing in front of everyone, though I changed that since she probably would’ve died of shyness.

I couldn’t put the proposal level up on our repository though since I was worried that she would find it. We had a database error and I lost a ton of work including the proposal level. I didn’t get a chance to work on it again until yesterday.

Yesterday was a flurry of events. I had to go to work, get press releases ready, and rebuild the proposal level. It wasn’t going to be as good as the original but I still had the tux costume asset for the pet. I had to remake all of the speech bubbles that I created and that took forever since I’m not great at photoshop. Then I had to set up all of the new triggers to make sure they would animate in correctly and tell her what I wanted to say at the right time. It took forever, my computer was slowing down, Xcode was taking forever doing anything, Unity takes forever to build, and I suck at photoshop. I was worried that my girlfriend would start becoming suspicious that I was taking a long time to get home especially since we’d planned on releasing right at midnight. But after a couple of hours at a coffee shop , where I was holding the urge to pee really badly, I finally got a working build.

I had the level in my on my phone in my pocket along with the ring when we were waiting to press the release button. I was slightly nervous but I knew that she was the one for me and no matter what happens with the game we would be happy. We click release on Apple and get a anticlimactic page refresh where we couldn’t tell if the game was on the store or not. Turns out it takes a couple seconds and maybe clicking it twice to work.

Without any suave way of saying it I turn to her and say “I have something to show you in the game.” and give her my phone. It opens up to the level and Rusty is already in his tux which kinda gives it away. She begins playing and is seeing the messages with a grin on her face, which makes me super happy. Then she dies 15 seconds into the level and has to start over! Facepalm but whatever! She gets to the end star and I get on bended knee to ask her the question I’ve been planning to ask for months.

She says yes and we kiss.

We’re super happy that we’re engaged and finally have our game out! We don’t really get to relax and enjoy today though since we’re working on telling everyone to go play Sky Pets.